Analytics with Livecode.

[FourthWorld]

You would say: things are complicated nowadays. You must learn.

I just might. I haven't found anything in life that doesn't benefit from study, more so in the rapidly-changing world of software development and publishing.

Going back ten years ago tough, I embraced LC for its easy of use, assuming that I could always count on being able to buy and plug the basic tools that any developer should have, without having to develop them by my self.
And some sort of App analytics is one of them, in my opinion.

If the business case is there for such an add-on, it may be worthwhile working with an experienced LCB scripter to make and sell a wrapper for Google's SDK.

Given the scope of the SDK's API and the range of things one could conceivably do with it, I'd guess the design phase would be at least as long as the development itself.

And given that design requires only knowledge of how you would like to use it in LC Script, you could draft that specification today.

In fact, once the spec is done you could submit it as a feature request for the team to consider, while soliciting interest from the community to see if one of us might be able to implement it even faster.

You might consider starting a new thread in the Extending LiveCode section of these forums to work with other members of the community to flesh out this specification. A note posted to the use-livecode list pointing to that discussion would help attract even more interest.

[trevix]

While I still don't understand why some sort of App analytics is not a default in the Livecode world, I preferred to build my own solution instead of waiting for something that I think should already be there.
I built a small klumsy (all of this should be in a hidden layer in my opinion) version of App analytics (called "MicroAnalytics"), that I want to share.
Hopefully others will pin in and make it better (I couldn't load it to the LC "sample stacks" because you must also have the FM file) or think how easily could be implemented in another scale.

What is it:
3 library substacks are used to collect some sort of analytics of you LC standalone application and transmit them, using the FM API over internet, to your FileMaker Server solution, where data can be displayed using various graphs and be seen on the WebDirect page of FMS. Will work on the development environment, on OSX and on iOS standalones (didn't test on Windows or Android)
NOTE: Open the FM db with "Admin" "333" (full access)

What do you need:
Filemaker Server 18, LC 9.5.1 or above.

How to:
Load the FM file to your Filemaker server.
Open the LC stack, go to the test page and change the IP address with the local or pubblic address of your FMS (ports must be open if not used locally)
Now every time you launch the stack (or standalone), after the first launch, MicroAnalytics will call home sending data to the FM solution. When you go to different cards will collect their name and seconds of session. As an alternative you can directely go to the test page (that holds the connection data), in order to send a test event (this will stop the timer thought).
Session time and events are always collected even without an internet connection and sent the first time there is one. Sessions are paused when the standalone is in background (like happens on iOS)

More instruction inside

Trevix

[mtalluto]

LiveCloud has mentioned something about developing analytics using their own proposal, but I think they stopped development.
The subject of this same post goes back to 2011...

Hi Trevix,

I am one of the developers for LiveCloud. I decided to pop in here and respond since our tracking feature was mentioned.

We do indeed have a tracking feature, but we have not released it. It is getting productized to make it easy to use. We never want to publish a half baked feature that will only disappoint and not fulfill anyone's needs.

We completed the tracking and data collection portion of the feature. We are still working on visualization and reporting.

We have been using the feature in one of our products. We learned a lot from the analytics we have collected. Data can help us make better decisions on where to spend our time developing. There are many metrics for making business decisions. Analytics is one of the most important ones.